American Corporate MSM Is Merged With CIA And Has Been Since The 1950s

With the recent back and forth seemingly taking place between two different factions of the American Deep State and playing out before the entire country, a few alternative media outlets have begun to question whether or not certain mainstream media outlets are actually connected to the Deep State, most notably the CIA. With an unimaginable scale of disinformation being released and promoted throughout mainstream channels on a daily basis, all propagandizing the public to go along with the desired direction of the American establishment, few could assume otherwise. However, such connections between American mainstream outlets and the CIA are more than mere conjecture, they are well-known and have been documented for some time.

For instance, back in the late 1940’s and early 1950’s, Operation Mockingbird, a plan known to many researchers today but known to virtually no one at the time it was originally being implemented, was a secret CIA effort to influence and control the American media and, thus, to influence and control the information received (as well as the opinions) of the American people. The first report of the program came in 1979 in the biography of Katharine Graham, the owner of The Washington Post, written by Deborah Davis.[1]

Davis wrote that the program was established by Frank Wisner, the director of the Office of Policy Coordination, a covert operations unit created under the National Security Council. According to Davis, Wisner recruited Philip Graham of the Washington Post to head the project within the media industry. Davis wrote that, “By the early 1950s, Wisner ‘owned’ respected members of The New York Times, Newsweek, CBS and other communications vehicles.” Davis also writes that Allen Dulles convinced Cord Meyer, who later became Mockingbird’s “principal operative,” to join the CIA in 1951.[2]

But while Davis’ book may have been the first mention of Operation Mockingbird by name, Carl Bernstein addressed the CIA influence over the media in 1977. According to Bernstein’s Rolling Stone article, after 1953, the media control program was overseen by Allen Dulles, the CIA Director. Bernstein says that, at that time, the CIA had influence over 25 newspapers and wire agencies. Bernstein wrote,

Among the executives who lent their cooperation to the Agency were Williarn Paley of the Columbia Broadcasting System, Henry Luce of Tirne Inc., Arthur Hays Sulzberger of the New York Times, Barry Bingham Sr. of the LouisviIle Courier‑Journal, and James Copley of the Copley News Service. Other organizations which cooperated with the CIA include the American Broadcasting Company, the National Broadcasting Company, the Associated Press, United Press International, Reuters, Hearst Newspapers, Scripps‑Howard, Newsweek magazine, the Mutual Broadcasting System, the Miami Herald and the old Saturday Evening Post and New York Herald‑Tribune. By far the most valuable of these associations, according to CIA officials, have been with the New York Times, CBS and Time Inc.

The CIA’s use of the American news media has been much more extensive than Agency officials have acknowledged publicly or in closed sessions with members of Congress. The general outlines of what happened are indisputable; the specifics are harder to come by. CIA sources hint that a particular journalist was trafficking all over Eastern Europe for the Agency; the journalist says no, he just had lunch with the station chief. CIA sources say flatly that a well‑known ABC correspondent worked for the Agency through 1973; they refuse to identify him. A high‑level CIA official with a prodigious memory says that the New York Times provided cover for about ten CIA operatives between 1950 and 1966; he does not know who they were, or who in the newspaper’s management made the arrangements.

The Agency’s special relationships with the so‑called “majors” in publishing and broadcasting enabled the CIA to post some of its most valuable operatives abroad without exposure for more than two decades. In most instances, Agency files show, officials at the highest levels of the CIA usually director or deputy director) dealt personally with a single designated individual in the top management of the cooperating news organization. The aid furnished often took two forms: providing jobs and credentials “journalistic cover” in Agency parlance) for CIA operatives about to be posted in foreign capitals; and lending the Agency the undercover services of reporters already on staff, including some of the best‑known correspondents in the business.

In the field, journalists were used to help recruit and handle foreigners as agents; to acquire and evaluate information, and to plant false information with officials of foreign governments. Many signed secrecy agreements, pledging never to divulge anything about their dealings with the Agency; some signed employment contracts., some were assigned case officers and treated with. unusual deference. Others had less structured relationships with the Agency, even though they performed similar tasks: they were briefed by CIA personnel before trips abroad, debriefed afterward, and used as intermediaries with foreign agents. Appropriately, the CIA uses the term “reporting” to describe much of what cooperating journalists did for the Agency. “We would ask them, ‘Will you do us a favor?’”.said a senior CIA official. “‘We understand you’re going to be in Yugoslavia. Have they paved all the streets? Where did you see planes? Were there any signs of military presence? How many Soviets did you see? If you happen to meet a Soviet, get his name and spell it right …. Can you set up a meeting for is? Or relay a message?’” Many CIA officials regarded these helpful journalists as operatives; the journalists tended to see themselves as trusted friends of the Agency who performed occasional favors—usually without pay—in the national interest.

. . . . .

During the 1976 investigation of the CIA by the Senate Intelligence Committee, chaired by Senator Frank Church, the dimensions of the Agency’s involvement with the press became apparent to several members of the panel, as well as to two or three investigators on the staff. But top officials of the CIA, including former directors William Colby and George Bush, persuaded the committee to restrict its inquiry into the matter and to deliberately misrepresent the actual scope of the activities in its final report. The multivolurne report contains nine pages in which the use of journalists is discussed in deliberately vague and sometimes misleading terms. It makes no mention of the actual number of journalists who undertook covert tasks for the CIA. Nor does it adequately describe the role played by newspaper and broadcast executives in cooperating with the Agency.

THE AGENCY’S DEALINGS WITH THE PRESS BEGAN during the earliest stages of the Cold War. Allen Dulles, who became director of the CIA in 1953, sought to establish a recruiting‑and‑cover capability within America’s most prestigious journalistic institutions. By operating under the guise of accredited news correspondents, Dulles believed, CIA operatives abroad would be accorded a degree of access and freedom of movement unobtainable under almost any other type of cover.

American publishers, like so many other corporate and institutional leaders at the time, were willing to commit the resources of their companies to the struggle against “global Communism.” Accordingly, the traditional line separating the American press corps and government was often indistinguishable: rarely was a news agency used to provide cover for CIA operatives abroad without the knowledge and consent of either its principal owner, publisher or senior editor. Thus, contrary to the notion that the CIA insidiously infiltrated the journalistic community, there is ample evidence that America’s leading publishers and news executives allowed themselves and their organizations to become handmaidens to the intelligence services. “Let’s not pick on some poor reporters, for God’s sake,” William Colby exclaimed at one point to the Church committee’s investigators. “Let’s go to the managements. They were witting.” In all, about twenty‑five news organizations including those listed at the beginning of this article) provided cover for the Agency

In addition to cover capability, Dulles initiated a “debriefing” procedure under which American correspondents returning from abroad routinely emptied their notebooks and offered their impressions to Agency personnel. Such arrangements, continued by Dulles’ successors, to the present day, were made with literally dozens of news organizations. In the 1950s, it was not uncommon for returning reporters to be met at the ship by CIA officers. “There would be these guys from the CIA flashing ID cards and looking like they belonged at the Yale Club,” said Hugh Morrow, a former Saturday Evening Post correspondent who is now press secretary to former vice‑president Nelson Rockefeller. “It got to be so routine that you felt a little miffed if you weren’t asked.”

. . . . .

From the outset, the use of journalists was among the CIA’s most sensitive undertakings, with full knowledge restricted to the Director of Central Intelligence and a few of his chosen deputies. Dulles and his successors were fearful of what would happen if a journalist‑operative’s cover was blown, or if details of the Agency’s dealings with the press otherwise became public. As a result, contacts with the heads of news organizations were normally initiated by Dulles and succeeding Directors of Central Intelligence; by the deputy directors and division chiefs in charge of covert operations—Frank Wisner, Cord Meyer Jr., Richard Bissell, Desmond FitzGerald, Tracy Barnes, Thomas Karamessines and Richard Helms himself a former UPI correspondent); and, occasionally, by others in the CIA hierarchy known to have an unusually close social relationship with a particular publisher or broadcast executive.1

James Angleton, who was recently removed as the Agency’s head of counterintelligence operations, ran a completely independent group of journalist‑operatives who performed sensitive and frequently dangerous assignments; little is known about this group for the simple reason that Angleton deliberately kept only the vaguest of files.

The CIA even ran a formal training program in the 1950s to teach its agents to be journalists. Intelligence officers were “taught to make noises like reporters,” explained a high CIA official, and were then placed in major news organizations with help from management. “These were the guys who went through the ranks and were told ‘You’re going to he a journalist,’” the CIA official said. Relatively few of the 400‑some relationships described in Agency files followed that pattern, however; most involved persons who were already bona fide journalists when they began undertaking tasks for the Agency.

Forty years later, Bernstein’s article is still a must read for understanding the CIA’s relationship to the corporate media.

Indeed, a declassified memo from 1965 confirms much of what Bernstein wrote about in 1977. This memo was addressed to the Deputy Director of the Directorate of Intelligence, Ray S. Cline, and revealed the names of several high profile journalists who were “receiving intelligence” from Cline. By “intelligence,” however, one can read simply that reporters were receiving their marching orders for publication and print from the CIA. The memo contained the names Joseph C. Hersch, Walter Lippmann, John Scott, Joseph Alsop, Wallace Carroll, Cy Sulzberger, Henry Gemill, Charles Bartlett, Max S. Johnson, Harry Schwartz, Bill Shannon, Jess Cook, Stewart Alsop, William S. White, Chalmers Roberts, Murrey Marder, Charles J.V. Murphy, Russell Wiggins, Alfred Friendly, Tad Szulc, and Kay Graham. The outlets listed include Christian Science Monitor, Los Angeles Times, NBC, TIME, Publishers’ Newspaper Syndicate, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, U.S. News and World Report, Saturday Evening Post, United Features Syndicate, Washington Post, Fortune, and Newsweek.

Even the U.S. government’s official summary of the overthrow of the elected President of Iran in the 1950s admits that the CIA was planting stories in the American Press. It reads, “In cooperation with the Department of State, CIA had several articles planted in major American newspapers and magazines which, when reproduced in Iran, had the desired psychological effect in Iran and contributed to the war of nerves against Mossadeq.”

In 1975, the U.S. Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations With Respect To Intelligence Activities found that the agency did indeed submit stories to the press. Chair of the Church Committee, Senator Frank Church, stated publicly, “I thought that it was a matter of real concern that planted stories intended to serve a national purpose abroad came home and were circulated here and believed here because this would mean that the CIA could manipulate the news in the United States by channeling it through some foreign country.” In other words, the type of propaganda that was supposed to be relegated to use against overseas enemies and target foreign populations was now being used at home.

During a question and answer session of the Church Committee, a CIA representative was asked a series of questions related to the possibility that the CIA was planting stories in the press. There are scarcely any lines to read between as the representative’s answers were obvious enough for what they did not contain; namely, a denial.

Question: “Do you have any people being paid by the CIA who are contributing to a major circulation — American journal?”

Answer: “We do have people who submit pieces to American journals.”

Question: “Do you have any people paid by the CIA who are working for television networks?”

Answer: “This I think gets into the kind of uh, getting into the details Mr. Chairman that I’d like to get into in executive session.”

(later)

Question: “Do you have any people being paid by the CIA who are contributing to the national news services — AP and UPI?”

Answer: “Well again, I think we’re getting into the kind of detail Mr. Chairman that I’d prefer to handle at executive session.”

In Deborah Davis’ book, Katharine the Great, it is reported that a CIA operative once told Washington Post owner Philip Graham that “You could get a journalist cheaper than a good call girl, for a couple hundred dollars a month.”

That the program is continuing to this very day is now more of an open secret than anything deeply hidden in the way it was in the 1950s to 1970s. The extent to which news is entirely produced by the CIA and other interested government parties, however, is what is generally kept from the American public tightly under lock and key. In 1975, the idea that the corporate media would lie and that the CIA would push fake stories for propaganda purposes was shocking but, in 2017, not so much.

Indeed, many things were shocking in 1975 that scarcely appear on the radar screen today. This is how far Americans have come down a path of acceptance of the loss of rights or even the appearance of honesty. This is, in part, due to the very programs I am writing about in this article. This says nothing of the massive amount of control the CIA and other related interests have over the entertainment industry. The entertainment industry, however, is a topic far beyond the scope of this article.

The United States continues to this day to pay journalists to write propaganda pieces that suit their agenda. For instance, it was reported by the New York Times itself in 2006 that the Bush administration paid journalist for anti-Cuba stories.

Remember also, Dr. Udo Ulfkotte, journalist and German political scientist who came out on public television and stated that, while working as a journalist, he was forced to print the work of intelligence agents under his own name. His refusal, according to him, would result in the loss of his job.

He said,

I’ve been a journalist for about 25 years, and I was educated to lie, to betray, and not to tell the truth to the public.

But seeing right now within the last months how the German and American media tries to bring war to the people in Europe, to bring war to Russia — this is a point of no return and I’m going to stand up and say it is not right what I have done in the past, to manipulate people, to make propaganda against Russia, and it is not right what my colleagues do and have done in the past because they are bribed to betray the people, not only in Germany, all over Europe.

A prominent national security reporter for the Los Angeles Times routinely submitted drafts and detailed summaries of his stories to CIA press handlers prior to publication, according to documents obtained by The Intercept.

Email exchanges between CIA public affairs officers and Ken Dilanian, now an Associated Press intelligence reporter who previously covered the CIA for the Times, show that Dilanian enjoyed a closely collaborative relationship with the agency, explicitly promising positive news coverage and sometimes sending the press office entire story drafts for review prior to publication. In at least one instance, the CIA’s reaction appears to have led to significant changes in the story that was eventually published in the Times.

“I’m working on a story about congressional oversight of drone strikes that can present a good opportunity for you guys,” Dilanian wrote in one email to a CIA press officer, explaining that what he intended to report would be “reassuring to the public” about CIA drone strikes. In another, after a series of back-and-forth emails about a pending story on CIA operations in Yemen, he sent a full draft of an unpublished report along with the subject line, “does this look better?” In another, he directly asks the flack: “You wouldn’t put out disinformation on this, would you?”

Dilanian’s emails were included in hundreds of pages of documents that the CIA turned over in response to two FOIA requests seeking records on the agency’s interactions with reporters. They include email exchanges with reporters for the Associated Press,

Washington Post, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and other outlets. In addition to Dilanian’s deferential relationship with the CIA’s press handlers, the documents show that the agency regularly invites journalists to its McLean, Va., headquarters for briefings and other events. Reporters who have addressed the CIA include the Washington Post‘s David Ignatius, the former ombudsmen for the New York Times, NPR, and Washington Post, and Fox News’ Brett Baier, Juan Williams, and Catherine Herridge.

. . . . .

The emails also show that the CIA asked the Post‘s Ignatius to speak at a May 2012 off-the-record conference, “Political Islam’s Future: Challenges, Choices, and Uncertainties,” for U.S. government intelligence analysts and policymakers. The invitation was extended in an email from the press office, which said that the conference organizers “would like you to draw upon the insight from your field experience, reporting, and broad network of contacts during the lead up to the Arab Spring to share how journalists sense that major political, social, or religious changes are in the making.”Ignatius replied that he would be “pleased and honored to do this,” but unfortunately he would be traveling in Europe on the day of the conference. The CIA then proposed “a smaller round table with our…folks sometime in the future.”

Fox News’ Bret Baier gave an address about the importance of charity in 2008 (which was reported at the time), and the then-ombudsmen for NPR, TheWashington Post, and The New York Times (Jeffrey Dvorkin, Michael Getler and Daniel Okrent, respectively), appeared together on a CIA panel. The event description said that journalism “shares some of the same missions that intelligence analysts have—presenting information in an unbiased fashion and challenging prevailing opinions.” The ombudsmen, the invitation said, could help the CIA “see how journalists deal with some of our common professional and ethical difficulties.” (It’s not clear from the documents when the ombudsmen event was held, but it would have been in 2009 or before.)

In 2007, Juan Williams, then at NPR in addition to his role at Fox News, gave a “standing-room-only” speech sponsored by the agency’s Office of Diversity Plans and Programs. During his speech Williams praised CIA personnel as “the best and brightest,” and said Americans admired the agency and trusted it “to guide the nation and the nation’s future.”

We now know that the BBC and other British media were used by the British secret intelligence service MI-6. In what they called Operation Mass Appeal, MI-6 agents planted stories about Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction, such as weapons hidden in his palaces and in secret underground bunkers. All of these stories were fake.

***

One of my favorite stories about the Cold War concerns a group of Russian journalists who were touring the United States. On the final day of their visit, they were asked by the host for their impressions. “I have to tell you,” said the spokesman, “that we were astonished to find after reading all the newspapers and watching TV day after day that all the opinions on all the vital issues are the same. To get that result in our country we send journalists to the gulag. We even tear out their fingernails. Here you don’t have to do any of that. What is the secret?”

For the first time in human history, there is a concerted strategy to manipulate global perception. And the mass media are operating as its compliant assistants, failing both to resist it and to expose it.

The sheer ease with which this machinery has been able to do its work reflects a creeping structural weakness which now afflicts the production of our news. I’ve spent the last two years researching a book about falsehood, distortion and propaganda in the global media.

The “Zarqawi letter” which made it on to the front page of The New York Times in February 2004 was one of a sequence of highly suspect documents which were said to have been written either by or to Zarqawi and which were fed into news media. This material is being generated, in part, by intelligence agencies who continue to work without effective oversight; and also by a new and essentially benign structure of “strategic communications” which was originally designed by doves in the Pentagon and Nato who wanted to use subtle and non-violent tactics to deal with Islamist terrorism but whose efforts are poorly regulated and badly supervised with the result that some of its practitioners are breaking loose and engaging in the black arts of propaganda.

***

The Pentagon has now designated “information operations” as its fifth “core competency” alongside land, sea, air and special forces. Since October 2006, every brigade, division and corps in the US military has had its own “psyop” element producing output for local media. This military activity is linked to the State Department’s campaign of “public diplomacy” which includes funding radio stations and news websites. In Britain, the Directorate of Targeting and Information Operations in the Ministry of Defence works with specialists from 15 UK psyops, based at the Defence Intelligence and Security School at Chicksands in Bedfordshire.

In the case of British intelligence, you can see this combination of reckless propaganda and failure of oversight at work in the case of Operation Mass Appeal. This was exposed by the former UN arms inspector Scott Ritter, who describes in his book, Iraq Confidential, how, in London in June 1998, he was introduced to two “black propaganda specialists” from MI6 who wanted him to give them material which they could spread through “editors and writers who work with us from time to time”.

In 2013, another blaringly obvious connection between the Washington Post and the CIA became apparent when it was revealed that the Washington Post’s sole owner, Jeff Bezos, also the owner of Amazon, saw Amazon clinch a deal with the CIA regarding cloud technology infrastructure. This calls into question the independence of the Washington Post’s coverage on the activities of the CIA and the ability of the outlet to choose to report or not report the planted stories by the agency. As RootsAction.org stated, “the Amazon-CIA deal is apt to be just the start.” The group added: “Amazon’s offer wasn’t the low bid, but it won the CIA contract anyway by offering advanced high-tech ‘cloud’ infrastructure. … Bezos is personally and publicly touting Amazon Web Services — and Amazon will be seeking future CIA contracts.”

Robert McChesney is co-author of Dollarocracy: How the Money and Media Election Complex is Destroying America and author of Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism is Turning the Internet Against Democracy, as well as professor of communications at the University of Illinois. When asked to comment on the Washington Post-Bezos-CIA-Amazon relationship, he responded,

“When the main shareholder in one of the very largest corporations in the world benefits from a massive contract with the CIA on the one hand, and that same billionaire owns the Washington Post on the other hand, there are serious problems. The Post is unquestionably the political paper of record in the United States, and how it covers governance sets the agenda for the balance of the news media. Citizens need to know about this conflict of interest in the columns of the Post itself.”

. . . . .

“If some official enemy of the United States had a comparable situation — say the owner of the dominant newspaper in Caracas was getting $600 million in secretive contracts from the Maduro government — the Post itself would lead the howling chorus impaling that newspaper and that government for making a mockery of a free press. It is time for the Post to take a dose of its own medicine.”

One of the most recent instances of CIA involvement in media is the ouster of former and short-lived National Security Advisor to President Donald Trump, Michael Flynn. While virtually every mainstream outlet is joining in the hysteria regarding Flynn’s resignation, a fact that is, in and of itself, reason enough to suggest a coordinated campaign, it is also important to note that the “leaks” of the conversation was originally printed in the Washington Post, an outlet that has long been known as a “leak outlet” for the CIA as demonstrated in this article. In fact, it was the acting Attorney General left over from the Obama administration, Sally Q. Yates, who issued the warning to the Trump administration regarding Flynn’s statements and conversation with the Russian ambassador.

Even more so, the attack on Flynn was initiated before Trump ever took office. During the last days of the Obama Administration, CIA Director John Brennan and James Clapper, the Director of the Office of National Intelligence, two individuals who were instrumental in cocking up the ridiculous “Russian Election Hacking” scandal and its evidence-bare reports were involved in monitoring Flynn’s conversation and arguing that his appointment would be a potential risk to national security and the Trump administration. As the Washington Post itself wrote,

In the waning days of the Obama administration, James R. Clapper Jr., who was the director of national intelligence, and John Brennan, the CIA director at the time, shared Yates’s concerns and concurred with her recommendation to inform the Trump White House. They feared that “Flynn had put himself in a compromising position” and thought that Pence had a right to know that he had been misled, according to one of the officials, who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence matters.

As former Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich pointed out, it is important to remember that a phone call from the incoming National Security Advisor to the President-elect of the United States was “intercepted” by the intelligence community and then given to the media for dissemination. This is an incredibly important piece of the puzzle, demonstrating that the entire affair is clearly part of an intelligence operation.

“What’s at the core of this is an effort by some in the intelligence community to upend any positive relationship between the U.S. and Russia,” Kucinich said.

“And I tell you there’s a marching band and Chowder Society out there. There’s gold in them there hills,” he said. “There are people trying to separate the U.S. and Russia so that this military industrial intel axis can cash in,” Kucinich added.

Kucinich also stated “There’s a game going on inside the intelligence community where there are those who want to separate the U.S. from Russia in a way that would reignite the Cold War.”

“What’s going on in the intelligence community with this new President is unprecedented. They’re making every effort to upend him. Who know what the truth is anymore?”

“There’s something very wrong here in the intelligence community,” he said.

When asked what Donald Trump should do, Kucinich answered, “First of fall, he has to get a hold of his own intelligence apparatus. You know? This isn’t a joke. This is a serious matter. If he doesn’t get control of where the information’s coming from, he’ll never know the truth, the American people won’t know the truth and we can be set at war with almost any country. Be very careful is my warning this morning.

If the CIA/intelligence community was behind the controversy, the story had to get out somehow and that “somehow” was the notorious CIA-laden Washington Post as well as its other corresponding outlets.

While literally volumes of material could be written documenting and explaining the CIA connection and manipulation of mainstream American (and foreign) media, the fact remains that virtually everything reported in the corporate press has been, at the very least, approved and allowed to be aired by much higher powers than bumbling editorial staff. It is notable, then, to point out that one mainstream outlet – generally Reuters or Associated Press – reports a story and every other major outlet follows suit, reporting the same story with the same perspective as all the others. In a sense, it is only necessary to influence the two and one has drastic levels of influence over the entire corporate media (now made up of only about 6 companies). The CIA, however, has influence over many more outlets than Reuters and AP.

Unfortunately, Americans, victims of the very propaganda outlets that have fed them the line that the United States is the freest country in the world with the freest press, will continually run back to the abuser and defend their media as if it is the world’s gold standard. As Zbigniew Brzezinski once said, “Shortly, the public will be unable to reason or think for themselves. They’ll only be able to parrot the information they’ve been given on the previous night’s news.” That information is provided to them by the worker bees of an elite oligarchy who are intent on controlling the opinions, thoughts, and direction of the American people, a goal they have very nearly reached, if they haven’t already, partly due to the fact that the CIA has access to the massive amounts of digital data willingly given to corporations and funneled to the NSA for the purposes of surveillance, profiling, and manipulation. This data alone has allowed the Department of Defense to create individual Avatars that can predict the behavior of every man, woman, and child in the country.

The information contained in this article is only the tip of the iceberg regarding one aspect of Anglo-American establishment’s technique of perception management.